Modernizing China’s Undergraduate Engineering Education Through Systemic Reforms Ideas, Practices, and Impacts

This book examines the comprehensive engineering education reform since China put forward its New Engineering Education policy in early 2017. It presents systematic reform measures at micro-level, such as national policies on massively building up new programs that cater to emerging state-of-the-art technologies in the industry, on developing synergistic approaches to education through tightened university–industry collaboration, and on formulating the four-level quality assurance mechanisms. The book also addresses meso-level institutional schemes and implementations at several case universities researched, and micro-level issues directly regarding teaching and student learning based on empirical studies.

Overall, this book provides the international community the knowledge of how international benchmarking of university engineering education is reflected in the Chinese context, and helps readers to gain an understanding the success and failure of different practices in achieving relevant reform goals.

Dr. Tengteng Zhuang is currently an assistant professor/lecturer at the Institute of Higher Education, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, which is one of the leading institutions in education science in Asia and the world at large. Having a dual background of engineering and education, Dr. Zhuang is focused on issues pertaining to the quality of higher education research, especially with a focus on STEM higher education in the Chinese context. He has published articles on both teaching and learning in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at Chinese universities, covering topics of students’ program satisfaction, students’ course satisfaction, students’ comprehensive educational process, faculty members’ teaching agency, factors influencing instructors’ delivery of contextual instruction, structural configurations such as university statutes that shape university faculty members’ work, China’s engineering education reform policies, and other engineering policy-related issues such as how Chinese education could be advanced by evidence-based educational research. His publications have appeared in various SSCI journals, such as Higher Education Research & Development, Cambridge Journal of Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, European Journal of Education, Asia Pacific Education Review, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and CSSCI journals such as East China Normal University Journal (Education Science), Tsinghua Journal of Education, and Journal of Higher Education Management. Dr. Zhuang's recent book is entitled Engineering Teaching in China's Higher Education: A Social Realistic Approach published by Routledge.